Saluting the Holy Ark of snark
Spy: The Funny Years
By George Kalogerakis, Kurt Andersen, and Graydon Carter
Miramax , 304 pp., illustrated, $39.95
"The Daily Show. " The Onion. E! VH1 reality programming. Gawker. Romenesko. What do they have in common? A debt of gratitude to their collective inspiration, Spy magazine. During its brief but glorious initial run, between 1986 and 1993, Spy was the most celebrated magazine in America. In honor of Spy's outsize influence on contemporary pop culture, and its dedicated coterie of fans, cofounders Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen, along with longtime contributor George Kalogerakis, have collaborated on this coffee-table-book-cum-hosanna tossed in the direction of the late, lamented satire magazine. In it, Carter and Andersen are stewards and captains of the great ship HMS Spy, boldly navigating where no magazine before them had gone, courageously taking on the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the litigious (overlapping subsets, no doubt).
From today's perspective, it is funny to read about Carter and Andersen as media gods, mostly being familiar with them as the editor of a magazine in love with Palm Beach heiresses and unsolved murders aboard yachts, and the author of one fairly decent novel and a series of mostly milquetoast columns for New York magazine. But like studying photographs of over-the-hill jocks and declaring it incredible that those puffy, battered bodies ever dominated the athletic fields, beginning with the present is a clear case of looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Once upon a time, Carter and Andersen were young, and angry, and possessed of an iron clad willingness to offend anybody and everybody. Time magazine once described Spy as an "upscale switchblade " of "good humor and bad manners," and classic Spy features like "Logrolling in Our Time" (featuring tit-for-tat book blurbs) and "The Spy 100 List" of loathsome New Yorkers make it clear that the magazine succeeded in large part due to its maliciousness. Spy made its subjects celebrities in order to humiliate them -- not every reader necessarily knew who Shirley Lord was, or whether Ivan Boesky was a Cabinet member or Wall Street mogul, but Spy celebrated the high and mighty to bring them crashing back down to earth, making them all equal in the gaze of its all-seeing satirical eye. There is a certain joy to be had from the sheer scabrousness of Spy at its no-holds-barred best, like its regular characterization of Henry Kissinger as a "socialite/war criminal."
The surprising, mostly forgotten fact about Spy's brief run is how serious they were about muckraking journalism. Hidden behind the pseudonyms and absurdist features like "Review of Reviewers" lay the soul of 1980 s Ida Tarbells, taking on conservative moguls' hideaway Bohemian Grove, smoking advertising, and other emanations of Reagan-inspired odiousness. Spy was frothy, and more than occasionally foolish, but it was rarely lightweight, and never the product of lazy minds . The sheer work required for such still-famed efforts like the publication of the New Yorker's masthead, the client list of Michael Ovitz's Creative Artists Agency, or "Spy's Exclusive Unauthorized Index to the Andy Warhol Diaries" was mind-boggling, and only added to the magazine's legendary cachet.
For all its media-world splash, Spy was often broke. Hiring staffers was mostly a matter of persuading young, talented writers and editors to accept poverty-level wages . Its staff may have been far from wealthy, but Spy succeeded in large part due to its presentation as an affordable luxury. Under the supervision of art director Alex Isley, Spy was crammed full of charts, graphs, sidebars, and other visual stimuli, intended to make the experience of reading the magazine a more all-encompassing assault on the senses than the average publication. When compounded with Spy's often-inventive typeface and layout, the result was a magazine whose innovations lay in its looks as much as its brains.
For the most part, the experience of reading "Spy ," like that of reading the magazine itself, is immensely pleasurable. There are enough funny, wonderful, and outright ridiculous moments to fill a weekend of reading, or a month of browsing. Certain references will be more familiar to some than others (I will admit some difficulty in decoding the famously unexplained Spy Lists included here), but items like the Legal All-Stars trading cards combine humor and sophistication into an intoxicating cocktail, expecting much from readers and never, never deigning to explain.
Spy's influence has undoubtedly diffused throughout the media universe. Its writers and editors have become keynote names on the mastheads of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and a dozen other major publications, and well-known novelists, screenwriters, and humorists, and its sensibility has become nearly default on the part of self-aware celebrity journalists, media commentators, and the like. The book undoubtedly pours it on a bit thick; the inevitable Spy-generated response on the part of readers will be to push back against its tendency toward relentless self-congratulation. Nonetheless, and notwithstanding the truly inexplicable lack of attention to the book's readability, "Spy: The Funny Years" is a worthy tribute to the magazine that launched a thousand snarky ships.
Saul Austerlitz's first book, "Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video From the Beatles to the White Stripes," comes out in March. 
